Planview AgilePlace vs. Rally Software

This tool enables the visual management needed in many offshore teams to easily and quickly see the pending work, work in progress and completed work.For teams that work with a waterfall methodology and do not have AGILE internalized, I believe there are other solutions from Planview or other providers.

Rally is well suited to help outline the specific tasks of a project, create timelines, indicate progress/status of tasks and provide views of team members' workloads. My team used it for our weekly stand up meetings in order to update one another on our progress, and our manager used it as a way to determine who had capacity for additional tasks. It facilitated our transition to a more agile work environment and we used it to implement 2 week "sprints".

Incentivized

• Visual kanban board that is easy to customize as the team's needs change
• Real time collaboration allowing teams working remotely to stay up to date on current status
• Allows versatility for how a team needs to capture details on the work at hand by utilizing card icons, card types and custom data points
• Card scoring is easy to setup and provides the team the ability to set values to better prioritize their backlog
• Ability to add card automation to take out some of the repetitive manual actions

• There are dashboards that provide friendly and useful metrics at the team, program and portfolio levels which help get an easy and quick visual representation of what's going on.
• Story management made easier, It offers a quick way of quickly entering a number of user stories without losing the overview, by just typing the title and selecting a few attributes directly in the overview screen.
• Sprint management is seamless in CA Agile Central . It allows you to drag stories from the backlog to the sprints and back again. When a story is dragged into an sprint, it automatically checks the velocity for that sprint and indicates how many more story points can be chipped in. No more manual checking needed by scrum master with respect to allocation and team velocity.
• Though CA Agile Central has many inbuilt apps, but it also has an App-SDK that allows you to build free app extensions using JavaScript and HTML. So, as per their needs, teams can customize & build various apps & dashboards.
• Dashboard is an awesome feature which allows you to select and drag panels with all kinds of graphical information about the current sprints and releases.
• It offers tremendous support for scaled Agile & almost all scaling frameworks are supported specifically tuned to SAFe .
• CA Agile Central includes several applications but it also integrates well with Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Eclipse, Subversion, IBM, HP, Salesforce.com and many other products to allow users to organize projects to their specifications. So you can still use Jira at a team level & CA Agile Central at the program & portfolio level for efficient tracking & management.
• The custom tags are very helpful in segregating the user stories based on the project needs. Even though it's a very small feature, it is very effective ( you will realize why specifically if you are using Jira).
• CA Central Agile enables agile delivery with ease and provides comprehensive features to track time-boxes, Work In Progress items of the forecast increments.
• Backlog management is hassle free since you can either drag and drop your user stories to the desired position on the backlog, or change a setting and manually enter priorities as a number.

• Ability to add more than 1 visual cue to the card. We use custom icons and sometimes more than 1 is appropriate but you have to choose which is most important since only 1 can be applied.
• Better visibility to board access from the user administration screens. Currently have to run 1-2 reports to see this information. Would like to be able to click on a user within Configure Users and see what boards they have access to quickly.

• User management is pretty basic and could be better. For example more filters and reports and more ability to do mass updates.
• The report generator is very, very basic and is not WYSIWYG. It has limited filters to generate reports. Often a Scrum master will need to export data to Excel or a tool like Crystal Reports to get enhanced reporting capability.

Incentivized

we are happy with the tool and the service and continuos improvement of the tool so there is no need yet to change to another one.

• To keep connecting my people, platform, and process for faster, smarter, better results.
• Making the right contribution to the community. Use Agile and Lean processes to manage the work of your team.
• Once you have tasted the positive result with Rally Software, you don't want to give up and come back to the old school of development pain any more.

Incentivized

LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.

Incentivized

Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available

Not experienced any outage

Incentivized

Don’t recall ever being unavailable.

Larger boards take longer to load

Incentivized

The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.

Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.

I've had to use support only one time and my issue was eventually resolved but not because of my ticket--because others complained about the functionality taken away so they brought it back. My ticket was never answered or addressed. So I can't really say much for the support factor for Rally.

Incentivized

It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better.

They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile.

I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial

Very easy.

Incentivized

Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before. 2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements All the stake holders has to be on the same page

Incentivized

Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.

Incentivized

It was a close race between Jama, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for Jama as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.

Incentivized

Good use cases for small/large teams

Incentivized

• LeanKit has made it easier for new employees to understand other employees' roles in the company by seeing their workload.
• It makes it clear who is responsible for what project so that there is more accountability at our company.
• It helps our project manager schedule new projects in a way that we all can see.

Incentivized

• it helped organizing many of the processes management use to communicate tasks with engineers, and provided detailed charts on the speed/blockage during any iteration
• with time Rally became the main tool we used to track and report tasks/defects in our projects, but frequent service outages made it very hard to continue consider as a reliable solution
• too much features is good, but for engineers a few features (User Stories section, iterations, defects, and Kanban boards) are necessary and the rest is just noise
• Kanban board support is lacking

Incentivized